Becoming Jane Doe

Chapter 4:

There was blackness surrounding me. Nothing. The absence of the world. Void. The pain I felt soaked into each bone, every muscle, the pain was swimming around in my bodily fluids and spreading itself throughout my body. It felt as if something was eating away at my insides. Pain surged into my brain causing a feeling as if someone had carved out my eyeballs and in doing so yanked out my optic nerve sending my mind into disarray. I had to be dead. This kind of pain wasn't something I wanted to live through. I must be dead. I was dead...or so I hoped.

My eyes shot open. The light burned my eyes but I forced them to stay open. Panic set in, if I wasn't dead then why did I feel so terrible? I looked around to see if I could identify where I was. A hospital. That was better than many places I could be. My mind went to me being in an abandoned building surrounded by heroin addicts. That was definitely a lot worse than a hospital. My ears heard the chatter of people talking nearby but I couldn't see them. Even though the people were loud somehow I felt silence; the silence that was accompanied by a hospital. A continuous beeping played on in my head. I thought it was just my ears ringing until I turned my head to see it was my heart monitor. A steady rhythm of beeping continued. I was actually alive. That seemed strange though when my body screamed that I was dying A nurse began walking into to the room but stopped dead in her tracks. She then left the room and returned a few minutes later followed by a male doctor as well as a few other nurses. I think my meds kicked in because I started feeling very drowsy but the pain started easing. There spoke using a lot of big words that I didn't understand. Maybe they weren't actually complex of words but I was in a haze due to the meds. The only words I could comprehend were 'coma' and 'Jane Doe'. Was I a Jane Doe? The sudden realize sunk in. I didn't know my name. I couldn't remember anything. Not my family, my past, or even my age. I tried of think of my last memory I had before waking up here, but I couldn't remember anything. I tried to think of anything else, anything that would tell me who I was. I couldn't. They didn't know who I was, and neither did I.

I muttered out, "was I in a coma?"

The doctor answered in a monotone like this was something he said every day, "yes, we found your body two weeks ago and you slipped into a coma after getting through all your surgeries."

How did I now remember that? They talked to each other after that only asking if I was in intense pain to which I answered yes. They increases my morphine to the highest I could legally be given. The pain somehow still was eating away at me. I couldn't think clearly, my body was weak. The doctor then said something about a needle and blood type. They checked my charts multiple times. They placed needle after needle into my skin. My drowsiness then overcame me and I fell asleep.

It was three days later when I woke up. I wasn't s heavily drugged anymore, which allowed me to feel my body aching. After few minutes of looking I found the button that elevated my upper body allowing me to comfortably sit up in the hospital bed. I looked around the room. There was an old woman in a bed on the other side of the room. She was asleep. I could tell that I wasn't in urgent care which didn't make sense to me when I felt like I could die at any moment from the pain I was in. Beside me there was an IV drip feeding me through my arm. The area around where the IV needle had entered my arm ached. My hands were cold which probably wasn't a good sign. I couldn't feel my legs, I needed to get up and walk around to let the blood flow. I wasn't sure if that would make my current condition worse though so I decided to talk to someone working here about it. Eventually a nurse walked into my room bringing flowers for the women in the bed on the other side of the room. I motion at a nurse to come over to me trying not the wake the elderly women.

"Can I get up and walk around a bit, I'm tired of sitting?" I asked her, speaking in a low tone.

A concerned look came across her face, this worried me slightly but I brushed the worry side, not every facial expression needed reading into